Refocusing the real-world using the optical see-through head-mounted display

Abstract

Optical see-through (OST) head-mounted display (HMD) enables the user to see the real-world and virtual objects together. Previous OST HMD-based augmented reality applications mainly attempt to render the virtual objects that are geometrically and photometrically well-aligned with the real-world. In this paper, we show that the user's perception of the real-world can be changed by overlapping the image of the real-world with the real- world. As a case study, we apply image refocusing to the captured real-world image and display the refocused image via the OST HMD such that the user sees the real-world and refocused image together. To this end, we first perform an experiment to find the relationship between the synthetic blur of the augmented object and the perceptual blur of the real-world object. We then apply the depth-adaptive image defocus blur to the image of the real-world to create the perceptual blur of the real-world. Experimental results show that the proposed method can make special visual effects to the real-world that the user sees through the OST HMD.